MasterCard APAC digital communication suite & strategy consulting

Headquartered in New York, United States, MasterCard Worldwide is a public traded company owned by more than 25,000 financial institutions that issue its branded cards. Remarkably, its Priceless campaign has run over 19 years worldwide. However, in the year 2010, it confronts the marketing team a big challenge: how to refresh and connect with audience in the dynamic digital world? “Prime time no longer exists and our audience is watching three different screens at the same time.” says Raja Rajamannar, MasterCard’s chief marketing officer, “Today’s connected audience are more reachable in real time and content is instantly shareable, which should be a dream for all marketers”.

Besides re-innovating its Priceless campaign via more diverse platforms since 2012, MasterCard experiments a digital listening program with my team at Prime Research. Initiated the program with its APAC markets, it aims for real-time data mining of all brand-related content on digital and social media across 5000+ platforms and instant performance evaluation of the update-to-date version of the Priceless campaign.

Working through many rounds of upgrading and de-bugging, our portal finally enables the marketing teams to get a handle on the massive UGC (user-generated-content) related to MasterCard brand against competition with customized dashboard reports generated instantly. Much more than a digital architect or technician, my team performs as a communication strategist with in-depth insights into on-going communication optimizations and becomes the first go-to consultant in PR crisis management with strong capability to identify KOLs (key opinion leader) and key opinion drives (e.g. 2014 Australia New Year greeting controversy). Our effort well solves “massive content” and “real-time” challenges posed to the marketing team and continues to make differences in business results.